Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver–Child Interaction Across Cultures

Clegg, Jennifer M.; Wen, Nicole J.; DeBaylo, Paige H.; Alcott, Adam; Keltner, Elena C.; Legare, Cristine H.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13443

Cited by 25 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Older children likely had a higher level of self-confidence as the task was easier for them than for younger children. Indeed, a recent study has shown that ni-Vanuatu children complete tasks they can do, and observe tasks they cannot do (Clegg et al, 2020), which fits the interpretation that older children decide on their own while younger children conform.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison.

Sibilsky¹,

Colleran²,

McElreath³

et al. 2021

Developmental Psychology

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Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative motivations underlying conformity, as well as intracultural variability in their age patterns. We measured conformity in both a public and a private setting among 5-to 11-year-olds from eight different communities in Vanuatu (n = 125, 59 boys), a highly diverse society in the South Pacific. We also explored whether selected sociodemographic variables help to explain individual variation in children's conformity. Conformity is lower in both public and private settings the older ni-Vanuatu children are, with conformity in public settings being subject to more developmental and intracultural variation. We infer that normative conformity is more variable than informational conformity. Moreover, we find that children in higher school classes conform less. Our study combines a developmental perspective with an intracultural comparison, and demonstrates that both the publicness of the experimental situation and intracultural variability are important for the understanding of the age patterns of conformity.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison.

Sibilsky¹,

Colleran²,

McElreath³

et al. 2021

Developmental Psychology

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“…Further evidence for this can be illustrated by additional research comparing Ni-Vanuatu and U.S. children's learning environments. When working together with children to complete a puzzle, Ni-Vanuatu caregivers used practices consistent with expectations that children learn using observation whereas their U.S. counterparts engaged in high levels of scaffolding and direct instruction (Clegg et al, 2021; as a note, these findings are consistent with Chavajay & Rogoff [2002] and Hewlett, Fouts, Boyette, & Hewlett [2011] among others). These different teaching norms may coincide with children's tendency to use the conventional or instrumental lenses more readily in different cultures.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 66%

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution

Jagiello¹,

Heyes²,

Whitehouse³

2022

Behav Brain Sci

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Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The Bifocal Stance Theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission, influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of inquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel ‘cultural action framework’ bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework.

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“…When Western adults consider the word "teaching," they may be imagining a formal school setting in which an adult is explicitly and verbally instructing a class of same-aged children. This scenario is actually a less common and more evolutionarily novel form of teaching which does not occur with the same regularity in non-WEIRD societies (e.g., Clegg et al, 2021;Lancy, 2010;Little et al, 2016;Rogoff et al, 2015). For instance, Marshall (1958) notes that there is no formal instruction among !Kung hunter-gatherers; rather, most children learn through observing those who are more experienced.…”

Section: Cognitive Deprivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is the expected human childhood? Insights from evolutionary anthropology

Frankenhuis

Amir

2021

Dev Psychopathol

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In psychological research, there are often assumptions about the conditions that children expect to encounter during their development. These assumptions shape prevailing ideas about the experiences that children are capable of adjusting to, and whether their responses are viewed as impairments or adaptations. Specifically, the expected childhood is often depicted as nurturing and safe, and characterized by high levels of caregiver investment. Here, we synthesize evidence from history, anthropology, and primatology to challenge this view. We integrate the findings of systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and cross-cultural investigations on three forms of threat (infanticide, violent conflict, and predation) and three forms of deprivation (social, cognitive, and nutritional) that children have faced throughout human evolution. Our results show that mean levels of threat and deprivation were higher than is typical in industrialized societies, and that our species has experienced much variation in the levels of these adversities across space and time. These conditions likely favored a high degree of phenotypic plasticity, or the ability to tailor development to different conditions. This body of evidence has implications for recognizing developmental adaptations to adversity, for cultural variation in responses to adverse experiences, and for definitions of adversity and deprivation as deviation from the expected human childhood.

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Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver–Child Interaction Across Cultures

Cited by 25 publications

References 71 publications

Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison.

Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison.

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution

What is the expected human childhood? Insights from evolutionary anthropology

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